36 Comments

I just worked out her idea in my head. Oh man! What a beautiful scheme or bet!

A Smithsonian magazine piece once said- A man kept himself in beer, all though college, by- betting people that he could make a quarter come up heads…three times in a row. [ I guess he didn’t win ALL the time, but playing with 50% odds was good enough for him].

Sounds to me like she’s playing “Nim”, a game of “take-away” (using 3-or-more piles of coins) that was already old in Shakespeare’s day. The name comes from “Nym”, an ‘Old Scottish’ word meaning ‘to steal’. The British treated the final coin as a WINNING move, but when the final coin is treated as a LOSING move, this is how it’s played in France, & they call this strategy “misere” (w/an accent over the last ‘e’). Both forms of the game can be won by using the same strategy, up until the final few turns.

Yeah, I used to do that too, always using a £2 coin, I had a good % accuracy. Until stupidly I told the girl I was seeing that I could do it, and was never allowed to use coin flips to settle arguments again. Had a good run though :)

You must live in an urbane area. Out here in the weeds, folk walk into the bars (plural) with all manner of odd farming implements. We still see tractors on Main street.Happy birthday, and many happy returns!News flash: science has proven that people who celebrate more birthdays live longer! Here’s to another trip around the sun for all of us.

Maybe I’m the target audience for this particular scheme, but I really don’t fully understand it.Let’s say you have a 100 coins in the pile. If on any persons turn they can take as many coins they want, but if they take the last coin they lose… what’s to stop a person on their turn from simply taking 99 coins? At that point it boils down to “who goes first, they win”.So yeah, not sure if I’m missing the point, I just broke this game, or if this is intentionally supposed to work on drunks. The “All But One” strat seems to break this game.

There are multiple piles of coins, and the setup is very specific. It’s called Nim, as was mentioned elsewhere. And to clarify, if he takes the last coin of ALL piles. He can take the last coin of a given pile, but the last coin on the table he CANNOT take.